About Me

I'm just me - a solitary wanderer who trekked across much of the world and recently retired to a small farm in the Ozarks.
My checkered past includes time spent as an Army officer, high school teacher and principal, real estate broker, child protection worker and administrator, and social worker with the U.S. military.
Over the years I have resided in a variety of places including Missouri, Virginia, Okinawa, Kansas, Kentucky, and Arizona. I have also traveled to Germany, Mexico, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, Belize, Guatemala, Taiwan, Guam, South Korea, Vietnam, and numerous islands in the Caribbean - including Cuba.
I have ridden in a Russian ambulance, hitch-hiked across Moscow late at night, fought an ostrich, celebrated New Year's at a street party in Hanoi, and bicycled across the Caribbean. My travels have taken me to Ground Zero in Hiroshima, the Bolshoi Ballet, China Beach, and the White House kitchen.
The nine things in life that I am most proud of are my children: Nick, Molly, and Tim, and my grandchildren: Boone, Sebastian, Judah, Olive, Willow, and Sullivan.
Life has been very good to me indeed!

Saturday, December 14, 2013

When Will the Shooting Stop?

by Pa RockCitizen Journalist

Today is the first anniversary of the slaughter of all of those bright, happy little children at the Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut - perhaps the greatest single moment of national shame in our America's history. Okay, the shooting itself was a premeditated crime, a tragedy. The shame comes in with the realization that as a nation we have done absolutely nothing to prevent this type of tragedy from occurring again, and, in fact, legislatures put far more effort into protecting and promoting the gun lobby than they have in protecting children - and that is truly shameful!

Sixty-two percent of gun bills that have been enacted in the past year have benefited the gun industry. Meanwhile, the bodies of dead kids just keep piling up.

Yesterday there was yet another school shooting - this one in Colorado less than eight miles from Columbine High School. The shooter, a student, wounded two other students (one critically), before killing himself. The school where the fighting occurred is not too far from the theatre in Aurora where so many died a year ago last summer. In the time between the Aurora shooting and the school shooting yesterday, Colorado voters recalled two legislators from office for favoring commonsense gun regulations.

Will the bloodshed ever end in Colorado - or anyplace else in America for that matter?

A friend and I were watching the news coverage of yesterday's school shooting over the Internet. The television reporter was interviewing an anxious mother who had showed up at the school to find and claim her daughter. After the mother told a little about her daughter, she stepped away from the reporter - and then immediately returned to air an afterthought. The mother said that she certainly hoped people would not use this shooting to clamor for gun control - "because we need our guns - for protection."

Yes, ma'am. When all human beings in America (including mental patients, ex-cons, spouse-abusers, and others of that stripe) are armed, primarily with automatic weapons (of course), we will be so much safer! The reporter then passed up a great opportunity to ask the woman, someone who could have easily lost a child that day, exactly what planet she was from.

That's what I wanted to know.

That protection malarkey was, is, and always will be nonsense. The best protection would be sensible gun regulations - ones that do not permit the ownership of automatic weapons with monster clips, background checks on all gun buyers - even those who purchase guns through private sales or at the mega-gun shows, and an adequately funded national mental health system.

Unfortunately, the gun industry has spent truckloads of money purchasing greedy legislators - people who are far more concerned with their own financial futures than they are with the lives of children. America learned nothing from Newtown, and those morons responsible for making our laws are proud of it!